This article was first published on Oct 10, 2025 in Hindustan Times
Recently I came across a 15-year-old relative logging on to YouTube to revise linear equations before his exam. Within minutes, his screen floods with unrelated suggestions: Videos on quick wealth, viral pranks, and breaking celebrity news. An hour later, he had not solved a single math problem. He feels restless, guilty, and inexplicably drained. His story captures the dilemma of a generation caught between access and excess, empowered by information yet overwhelmed by it.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) was designed to simplify life, to curate and organise the world’s knowledge. Yet, in practice, it has multiplied distraction. Algorithms built to personalise our experience now amplify noise, turning the “information superhighway” into a labyrinth of endless recommendations, alerts, and notifications. Human cognition, evolved for depth and context, is struggling to survive in an ecosystem optimised for velocity and volume.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego estimate that the average person now consumes nearly 34 gigabytes of information per day, roughly equivalent to watching five full-length films. With AI-driven content recommendation and multitasking culture, that number is almost certainly higher today. The result is a mind perpetually alert, yet increasingly unable to sustain focus.
UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report 2023 warns that while technology enhances access, it is also reshaping how young people learn, shortening attention spans and eroding reflective capacity. Its State of Education Report for India 2024 finds that nearly half of adolescent experience fatigue, eye strain, or disrupted sleep linked to prolonged screen exposure. Across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations, 96% of 15-year-olds now have access to a computer or tablet at home, and 98% own a smartphone, meaning the digital environment envelops almost every waking hour. In nearly all participating countries, over half the population of teenagers spend more than 30 hours a week on devices for work and leisure combined. The consequence is cognitive fragmentation at a scale humanity has never before experienced.
The impact of this constant mental churn extends far beyond distraction. Each day, people make hundreds of micro-decisions, which notification to check first, which news to trust, which message to reply to. Over time, this cognitive clutter erodes focus and emotional stability. Decision fatigue has become a quiet epidemic of its own.
The World Health Organization recorded a 25% global increase in anxiety and depression in 2020, much of it linked to the social and digital disruptions of the pandemic. The online world that once promised connection became a conveyor belt of crisis — exposing users to rolling waves of bad news, misinformation, and fear. Among adolescents, WHO’s European data show that problematic social media use rose from seven percent in 2018 to 11% in 2022, strongly associated with disturbed sleep and higher stress. UNICEF’s Childhood in a Digital World report adds that while connectivity brings opportunity, unmoderated exposure, to harmful content, online harassment, and social comparison, can intensify loneliness and anxiety.
Adults, too, are trapped in the same loop. AI-based productivity tools were meant to save time; instead, they have expanded the workday. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index 2022 found that employees now spend significantly more time in virtual meetings and receive 42% more messages after hours than before the pandemic. The OECD’s How’s Life in the Digital Age underscores how unbroken connectivity erodes recovery time, the mental space essential for creativity, empathy, and rest. Productivity has become perpetual motion, with little pause for restoration.
The way forward is not to reject technology but to redefine our relationship with it. AI, like any tool, reflects human design. The danger lies not in its existence but in our uncritical surrender to its rhythm. Managing mental wellness in the AI era requires a balance between cognitive stimulation and emotional stillness: between knowing more and absorbing less.
UNESCO and the OECD have both urged countries to integrate digital wellbeing into education and policy. UNESCO’s media and information literacy framework calls for teaching individuals how algorithms influence what they see, and how to consciously moderate digital consumption. The OECD recommends “safety by design” platforms that embed reflection and rest rather than optimise only for engagement.
There is another dimension often overlooked in conversations about overload: inequality. While some of us drown in data, others remain digitally stranded. UNICEF and the International Telecommunication Union estimate that two-thirds of the world’s school-age children, about 1.3 billion, lack internet access at home. In low-income countries, fewer than one in twenty have household connectivity, compared to nearly nine in ten in high-income nations. The digital divide thus creates a paradoxical landscape: One half battling the mental health consequences of overexposure, the other deprived of the very tools needed to learn and connect.
The challenge of the 21st century, then, is not merely to ensure access to information but to safeguard the ability to process it wisely. Attention must be treated as a finite resource: Guarded, replenished, and respected. Silence, once incidental, must now be deliberate. Walks without phones, meals without screens, and conversations uninterrupted by notifications are no longer luxuries but essentials for mental recovery.
In a world where engagement is currency, and distraction is design, the simplest act of resistance may be to pause. Between one scroll and the next lies the possibility of reclaiming clarity: a small, personal rebellion against an age that has mistaken connectivity for consciousness.
Link to the original publication: Managing mental wellness in the age of AI
